Walter Goffart

Goffart, Walter André (1934-2025) Professor Walter Goffart, historian of medieval Europe inter alia, died at home in New Haven, Connecticut, on February 14, 2025, one week short of his 91st birthday. His humor, his intellectual range, and distinctive charm will be missed by friends and family in North America and abroad. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1960 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1999. During those years, he published more than sixty essays as well as ten scholarly books foundational in the field ranging in subject from ninth-century monastic forgeries to late Roman taxation, from barbarians and Romans in the fifth and sixth centuries to Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon in the sixth, seventh, and eighth. On retirement, he received a collection of essays dedicated to his work and teaching, edited by Alexander Callander Murray. In 2000 he joined Yale University as a senior research scholar and lecturer, an appointment followed by the publication in 2003 of his magisterial survey of historical atlases (1570-1870). In 2020 he wrote his final monograph: a biography of Alexander Smith Cochran, founder of Yale's Elizabethan Club, and the remarkable woman to whom this industrialist was briefly married. Walter was born in Berlin, the son of Francis-Léo Goffart and Andrée Steinberg. His father was a Belgian diplomat; his mother, born in Cairo, had a French mother and a Romanian/Jewish father. He. his siblings, and their mother were living in Belgrade in 1941 when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia. They fled on the Orient Express, passing through Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Cairo before taking ship south of Suez. After 68 days at sea, they reached New York City. Walter received all three of his academic degrees from Harvard (1955, 1956, 1961). In 1967-1968 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in 1973-1974 a visiting fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, and in 1979, a Guggenheim fellow. In 1982 he was elected a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, which awarded him its prestigious Haskins Medal in 1991. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996. In the 1990s, visiting fellowships took him to the Newberry Library, to the University of Wisconsin, to Pretoria, South Africa, to Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, and to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2001 he was awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation study center in Bellagio and in 2015 at the Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa. Between 2004 and 2014 he served as faculty lecturer on numerous Yale Alumni cruises, presenting talks ranging from relatively recent history (Anzio Beachhead, Murmansk convoys, the scuttling of the Imperial German Fleet in Scapa Flow) to the Knights Hospitaller at Rhodes (1309-1522), medieval Iona, and the Dalmatian coast and Venice. The last public talk he gave, "Me and the 'Fall of Rome'," was at a 2018 symposium honoring Elizabeth A. R. Brown, a treasured friend from college days who predeceased him in 2024. Walter is survived by his wife (m. 1977), two older siblings, two daughters from a previous marriage, and one granddaughter. To plant Memorial Trees in memory of Walter Goffart, please click here to visit our Sympathy Store.